MAYDAY - Book review

Nelson DeMille and Thomas Block’s air-disaster thriller Mayday is a fast-paced page-turning relentless story of suspense.

It was first published in 1979, updated in 1997 and reprinted at least ten times.

Block had assisted DeMille with aviation scenes in his debut novel By the Rivers of Babylon (1977). They were old friends and, after that collaboration, they jointly decided to write a definitive novel about the sudden decompression of a supersonic aircraft, such as Concord, travelling effectively in subspace, and Mayday was the result.

The blurb says it all: ‘Twelve miles above the Pacific Ocean, a missile strikes the Trans Flight 52, a supersonic passenger jet bound for Japan. The flight crew is crippled or dead. Now, defying both nature and man, three survivors must achieve the impossible. Land the plane.’

The missile strike is a US navy test that went wrong. Fortunately, there was no warhead. But it blasted a hole into and out of the airliner, causing the massive decompression.

The disaster is complicated by the loss of radio contact, the arrogant naval Commander Sloan who is desperate to cover up the incident, and the chicanery of the boss of Trans-United Airlines. This has the potential to ruin the airline – just as PanAm was effectively ruined by the financial fallout of the Lockerbie bombing (1988) (it filed for bankruptcy in 1991).

If you’re afraid of flying, it’s probably best to give this book a miss. If you like a high-tension edge-of-seat read, then this will satisfy.

I’ve deliberately avoided giving much in the way of character names and events as the blurb suffices as a spoiler.

DeMille never disappoints. Block has written several aviation-oriented bestsellers.

A TV-film was released in 2005. 

ABANDONATI - Book review

Garry Kilworth’s 1988 dystopian novel Abandonati is a slim volume but it packs a powerful punch.

The abandonati are the street people, homeless or mentally ill, with no place to go – the abandoned ones, unwanted castaways from our society.

The blurb inside describes it as a funny and moving fable. And it is that.

Some unspecified apocalypse has left groups of people, mostly dazed and without purpose, save scavenging for food – and hopefully, booze – in a deserted and seriously damaged vast city.

Guppy is one of the scavengers and he is not particularly bright – he didn’t even know he was named after a fish – and he is an alcoholic. ‘You just forgot things. You been boozin’ so long it’s made your brain soft. That don’t mean you’re stupid, do it? Stupid is when you pretend to know everything, and don’t...’ (p32)

He soon encounters a little but cocky guy called Rupert and a big yet docile black fellow Trader.

Rupert is convinced that the rich people have escaped to another planet, leaving the ‘dregs’ behind. He is determined to construct a space ship to follow them.

There are two short italicised sequences. One shows two spacemen landing on a planet with breathable air. They walk on purple springy grass – which is spooky for me, as many years ago when our daughter was small I made up a bedtime story about a boy called Jack who had many adventures, among them walking on purple springy grass! The other sequence again features two men, army officers in a bunker, who appear to be still fighting a war... I’m not sure whether these inserts explain the apocalypse, or are flashback vignettes; to my mind they seemed out-of-place, interrupting the flow of the trio’s journey. A minor quibble.

Before long, the reader is wrapped up with trio’s quest through the devastated city, confronting violent gangs and also a friendly bunch of folk who have found a secret cache of wine in the crypt of a church. Another group they meet are travellers – and one of their women takes a shine to Guppy with amusing consequences.

All three are endearing in their own way.

Rupert has a tendency to swear – not a lot – but it is remarked upon by the gentle giant Trader: ‘You do too much swearing. It doesn’t mean anything if you do too much’ (p67) – which is so true!

However, Guppy is the core of the book, which, among other things, is about humanity surviving despite adversity. ‘Guppy was illiterate, but he could read people like books’ (p106). ‘Guppy couldn’t hold something in his mind for very long. Other thoughts kept coming in, day by day, and evicting the current owners. Guppy’s mind was not inhospitable to thoughts, but there was limited space and only one or two could remain in residence at any set time’ (p130). ‘You can’t help loving someone who makes you think you’re special’ (p131).

There are instances of gentle humour, distress, and even a poignant death – but Guppy manages to swim through it all. This is a very moving book whose characters tend to live on after the last page. Indeed, they are not abandoned. 

PS - The cover features artwork by Dave McKean. He came to prominence with covers for DC comics. My failing, but his artwork - and this cover - do not appeal to me.

A Departure - Book review

This book, A Departure,  has gathered quite a momentum of praise and exposure. Admittedly, some of this is due to the youth of the author. Tom Ward was about twenty-three when he wrote it. Received wisdom would have us believe that the age of the author is not relevant, it’s the story that counts – either it works or it doesn’t, it either involves the reader or it doesn’t. I’d go along with that. Still, once I’d read the book and then checked out the Amazon reviews, I was struck by the range in comments. A Departure has acquired an enviable number of reviews. Yet some of the reviews are not real reviews, simply stating something along the lines of ‘A great book, I couldn’t put it down, look forward to Tom Ward’s next one.’ Other less complimentary reviews highlighted his age and perceived inexperience, while several commented on typos. [The publisher has since attended to the typos].

Tom Ward took a risk, embarking on a debut novel in the dystopian genre. There’s a long history of this type of work, going back even before John Wyndham and Brian Aldiss, the authors who introduced me to the sub-genre . The conceit is depicting how ordinary individuals cope with their new and darkened circumstances, and to a large extent I believe Tom Ward achieves that, despite some stylistic flaws.

 

Michael Taylor is approaching the end of his teens when ‘the event’ occurs. We don’t get told what happened, though it’s hinted that it might have had something to do with global warming. Plenty of disaster novels don’t give the reasons – simply thrusting their characters into the new changed world. Whatever the cause, it seems that the vast majority of people have succumbed – simply died in their tracks. Eerily empty streets, beloved of disaster movies, are depicted realistically. Michael’s encounter with a man who intends to steal the family car is the first of several scenes where extreme violence raises its head – and it’s uncomfortable in its depiction, and in Michael’s psyche.

Michael returned home briefly after his family’s failed attempt to leave the country met with the deaths of his parents and sister. Now, he sets off in a stolen car, heading first to his grandparents’ house. Already, he’s quite hardened to the sight of dead bodies. His eventual leave-taking of his proud grandfather is moving without being mawkish. ‘Something sank in Michael’s chest as his bottom lip began to quiver. Suddenly, he was a young boy again, crying at his grandparents’ house after falling over, but this time a plaster and some Germolene would not make things better.’

He then goes south, in a hazy attempt at finding succour. On his way, he encounters a mixture of strange, interesting, violent people, all understandably affected by the apocalyptic event. He is not alone for long, soon joining up with Judith, then David and Zanna, encountering a religious group, a pseudo-government-run tent camp, a supermarket refuge for youths, and an isolated farmer and wife.

There is a danger with this kind of novel that it will be bleak throughout: ‘The corpses were scattered over the fields like seeds in spring.’

Yet we know from first-hand accounts that even survivors of the Holocaust had cause to rely on humour to get them through their horrendous ordeal. Humour is part of the human condition. And so Tom Ward gives us humour, too, for example:

 
‘Michael walked on, guitar song assaulting his ears from all directions. It seemed as though guitar players had been exempt from the apocalypse.’

There are many glimpses of good metaphor and description, too: ‘… June sun quickly turned the air thick and warm, the tent walls sagging inwards like a surrendered lung that could breathe no more of the heavy air.’ And I liked this description – ‘Judith cut in, her voice hard as a week-old scone.’

 
Unexplained disasters throw up survivors and in some way they prove the theory of the survival of the fittest; not necessarily fit in a physical sense, or exhibiting a higher capacity of intelligence; it may be something as simple as the fitness of certain genetic pointers carried by those who live on.

And the book’s title can be viewed on several levels. The story is a departure for Michael, moving from boyhood to manhood, since it’s definitely a coming-of-age tale. It is also a departure for the survivors from everything they knew, everything familiar. And ultimately it’s a departure by some survivors from the UK.

 
I particularly liked the neat ‘golden’ reference at the beginning and its echo at the end of the book.
 
A worthy debut novel. Tom Ward should be encouraged to keep writing. I would hope that he doesn't take the negative comments too much to heart and make his literary departure. For he has much to offer readers as he evolves. (I've been writing for over forty years and I'm still evolving!)

[A shorter version of the above review will be posted in Amazon and Goodreads.]

FFB - PORTENT

Now we have some experts telling us that in a matter of decades most of Earth will be uninhabitable due to man-made global warming – unless we act soon. I suspect the earth might throw a proverbial spanner in those predictions… Even so, this Friday Forgotten Book may be considered timely. Published in 1992, Portent is one of the late great James Herbert’s best.

The cover warns that ‘The world will never be the same again.’ The story begins with newspaper clippings of penguins committing mass suicide in 1990, then in the next two dozen pages ranges to the near future, to the Great Barrier Reef, the Gulf of Mexico, and British Columbia, where we witness the catastrophic demise of some interesting characters; it’s as though the world’s gone mad, the weather and tectonic systems in concert with the appearance of eerie bright lights, are causing untold devastation, swamping islands, killing thousands of people.

One survivor from an earlier disaster, Rivers, a climatologist, is summoned to the home of a strange family; here, he meets Diane, her two mysterious adopted children and the academic who believes the world has had enough with the depredations of mankind and is fighting back…

James Herbert, R.I.P.

Portent is a superior disaster novel, and maintains a tense suspenseful pace throughout. The vignettes are well researched – some of the disasters recognisably extrapolated from recent events (1990s) – and divulge a great deal of interesting detail. The many characters we encounter from numerous countries are believable and evoke sympathy. The action and disaster sequences are graphic but not gratuitous, credible and, because of that, quite horrifying. The various disasters are portents: auguries of the death-throes of a planet? Ultimately, the book is about good and evil, in all their guises. A Green plea which deserves to be heard – and read. Highly recommended.

[Note to politicians – just don’t use this to try to make us feel guilty and tax us even more!]